In modern industrial operations such as factories and computing environments such as data centers, a large amount of automation can occur, e.g., by robotic machines that perform operations on a factory floor, or servers that that perform computing in a data center environment. Human operators who interact with these automated systems can typically access only a limited amount of information regarding operation of these systems when present in the location of the equipment. For example, a rack of servers may include stickers to identify servers or various indicators, e.g., visible lights, to identify an operating server, networking and other devices. More commonly, greater amounts of information regarding the systems can be available remotely. For example, in the data center context, a data center employee such as a systems administrator or technician can access a server via a remote desktop and a remote control card present in the server. Although such remote control access can be suitable for many tasks, it is of no value to the user when at the location of the server.
Furthermore, in many data centers, employees who walk the data center may be unaware of any issues that may be present in the data center equipment, as generally there are no resources on the data center floor, other than failure lights or audible beeps. In the absence of such audible or visual alerts, the user is unaware of whether a device is working or not. Further, when a user does become aware of a failure in a server, e.g., due to a remote notification, it is difficult for the user to determine the actual location of the failing server, which can be present in a rack with many other rack-based servers. Thus although the typical data center employee can use existing management infrastructure to monitor devices, this monitoring is not readily available when a user is present on the data center floor.